


Dissection

by glitterburn (orphan_account)



Category: The Borgias
Genre: Gen, public dissection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2012-11-06
Packaged: 2017-11-18 03:11:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/556236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/glitterburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Micheletto attends his first public dissection during the winter of his fifteenth year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dissection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_alchemist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_alchemist/gifts).



“I am curious,” Cesare says as they make their way towards Rome.

Micheletto turns his head slightly. “Curious about what, Your Eminence?”

“Why you told your mother you were a medical student.” For all that he wears an easy smile when he looks in Micheletto’s direction, Cesare’s eyes are very dark. He wants the truth, as he always does, but the truth is not always pleasant and rarely is it simple.

“I would spare her the knowledge of my true calling,” Micheletto says.

Cesare laughs. “Come, now. Pretending to be a healer when you are an assassin, that is— It is like...”

“Calling oneself a cardinal whilst drawing plans for battle?” Micheletto flicks a measured glance towards his master. “Your pardon, my lord, if I spoke out of turn.”

“You did.” Cesare seems amused rather than offended. “But point taken. I shall attempt to curb my curiosity, since you seem not to be of a mind to indulge me.”

“I would indulge you.” Micheletto pulls up and walks his horse alongside Cesare’s mount. “I tell her I am a medical student because that is what I was. Once.”

“You studied?” Cesare’s surprise is a physical thing, warming the air between them. “Where did you study? How...”

His voice tails off, the question abandoned, but Micheletto knows what he was about to ask and answers anyway. “In Bologna. I could not pay. I was not enrolled at the university. But I learned all the same.” He casts another glance at Cesare. “Some transactions are not paid in coin but in deeds. So it was with my teacher and me.”

Cesare nods, his expression shuttered now. “What was his name?”

“Salvadori.” Micheletto smiles, more from irony than from any happy memory. “His name was Bernadino Salvadori.”

*

Micheletto attends his first public dissection during the winter of his fifteenth year.

The promise of spectacle and edification is cried through the streets as he and his father arrive in Bologna. The lure of such entertainment rouses only mild interest in the townsfolk, but for Micheletto it seems to offer a place of sanctuary.

The harvest was bad this year, and the price of grain is rising as winter tightens its grip. Micheletto knows his father has insufficient funds to buy the goods they need to see them through to the spring. His father has been foul of temper ever since they left Forli, and along the road Micheletto has borne the brunt of both curses and beatings for the slightest infraction, real or imagined. He knows that as soon as their business at market is concluded, his father will seek out the nearest tavern, doubtless to wench and drink himself into furious oblivion. And when the coin is spent and the women leave and the ale no longer flows, his father will turn on him.

Micheletto knows this as an inevitability, like day following night. It is God’s will, or so the priests say. A son must obey his father. It is the natural order of things, especially for people such as them. But Micheletto knows that the natural order can be upset. This time he will not sit in the dirty straw of a tavern, nursing a cup of weak ale and waiting for his father to notice him enough to strike him.

This time he walks away from their cart while his father is still arguing over the price of grain. He follows a group of students through an archway, and there he passes amongst the gathering spectators. He takes their measure, rich and poor and those in between, and then he presses through them, coarse wool rubbing against fine silks, the smell of the fields woven between popinjay scents. 

The lecture hall is already crowded, ghost-whispers of breath drifting in the air. Men stamp their feet and complain of the cold, then remind one another that the cold is good for preserving dead flesh. Then they swap stories of other dissections performed in warmer weather, of corpses over-ripe and bursting, and they laugh, but their laughter is tinged with uneasiness.

Micheletto has never been uneasy around death. He had siblings, once. They died: a brother of sweating fever, another of some undiagnosed malady when he was still in swaddling bands, and a sister who swelled up with child though unmarried. She died of shame, so it was said, but Micheletto knew their father had beaten her until she lost the babe in a violent slick of red, and she’d died, too. Probably for the best, their father had said. Another example of natural order. 

In slow increments, Micheletto worms his way right to the front at one side of the seating area. He leans over the wooden railing and gazes upon the stage, shutting out the confusion of voices around him.

The dissection table is of grey-veined marble. It looks much like an altar denuded of its cloth, but instead of candles and the Host, it has deep grooves cut through its surface. The wooden floor around the table is scattered with earth and straw, and there are pails placed nearby.

Micheletto switches his attention to the crowd. Some are curious townsfolk, but the majority are students. One of the students on his row has an unsteady gait and jostles Micheletto. There’s the sour stink of cheap wine and old sweat, and then the student turns, his reflexes slow, and offers an apology. He smiles, too, and holds out a small flask. “One should never attend Professor Salvadori’s dissections without the necessary means to bolster one’s courage.” 

Summoning an approximation of a smile in response, Micheletto refuses the drink. “Does the sight of blood disturb you?”

“Not blood.” The student laughs and takes a swig from the flask. Wine trickles down his chin. “I brawl often enough to be familiar with the sight of blood. Viscera, though—especially when it’s putrefying, when decay has taken hold... That disturbs all my senses.”

Before Micheletto can ask further questions, the doors swing open to admit a bizarre procession. Two young men carry the draped cadaver between them. They walk slowly, with great solemnity. Following them with measured step is a man of middle years and pale complexion, dark-eyed and with hair the colour of old snow, frozen again and again. Conversation ceases, and the spectators ready themselves.

To Micheletto, it looks much like the entrance of the priest before Mass. Even though the cadaver is that of a criminal, the professor treats it with reverence. He stands over the body and helps guide it from its stretcher onto the slab, and when he reveals the corpse, he does so with gentle hands. No matter how grave the sins committed by this man while he still lived, he yet remains an example of God’s creation.

The professor’s assistants carry over a small table and set it down. Laid upon it are saws and knives and forceps and other implements Micheletto cannot name.

“Salvadori conducts his own dissections,” the student murmurs as the professor selects a knife and begins by making an incision into the lower abdomen. “Others prefer to read from the _Anatomia_ while a surgeon does all the carving, but Salvadori enjoys getting his hands dirty. He disagrees with some of what Mondino wrote in the _Anatomia_ and likes to prove his point every time he cuts into a cadaver.”

This means nothing to Micheletto, but he nods anyway. “It seems only right that a man who practises medicine should be acquainted with a body rather than a book.”

The student snorts. “He is an anatomist, not a doctor.”

“Surely it is the same thing?”

“Not always.”

Micheletto is curious, but when the student does not elaborate, he goes back to watching. Professor Salvadori works fast, his cuts as neat and confident as a butcher slaughtering an animal. If the man on the slab had been brought in here alive, his death at Salvadori’s hands would have been quick. Micheletto admires that. Death is the end of suffering of one sort or another; how much better it would be to be despatched with swift efficiency rather than to have the agony prolonged.

The lower abdomen is agape now, coils of intestines resting atop the corpse’s chest. Out comes the liver, the kidneys, the spleen. Salvadori talks the whole time, his voice modulated to carry throughout the hall, his tone pleasant as he discourses about Hippocrates and Galen, the names as obscure to Micheletto as those of saints.

The viscera are pushed aside, slopping into the pails held by the assistants. Now for the opening of the thorax. The splintering crack of ribs breaking sounds over-loud in the hall. The flaps of flesh and muscle are folded back, Salvadori’s large hands and muscular forearms dipped and spattered with gore as he reveals the glistening interior of lungs and heart.

“Oh dear.” The student holds the sleeve of his gown to his face. He’s sweating, even though there’s still a chill in the air. “Perhaps I’ll—” He stops, sways for a moment, then pushes past Micheletto and hurries away.

Micheletto watches him go, then returns his attention to the dissection. He has seen a man torn open before, but never has he seen the top of a skull sawn off. It is a strangely compelling sight, and one that brings several other spectators to their knees, overcome with nausea or faintness. Micheletto leans forward to see more.

When the display is ended and the crowd disperses and the assistants begin to clean up, Micheletto lingers at the railing and stares at the remains of the cadaver. It looks like meat; it looks like ruin, and yet there is a strange beauty to it.

Salvadori approaches him. “I have not seen you here before.”

“My first time.” Micheletto slides his gaze past the professor and continues to study the cadaver. “It was interesting.”

“You enjoyed it.”

There’s such conviction in the professor’s voice that Micheletto looks up again. Salvadori’s eyes gleam with an animal kind of cunning, as if like is recognising like.

“There are certain types of people, I’ve found, who attend public dissections,” Salvadori says. “One is the student, who has little choice in the matter. The second is the curious. They come because they knew the deceased during life and wish to see him punished further, or they have a love of death, or a fear of it, and they wish to see what it looks like. There are those who are excited by what they see, and then there are those of a certain religious bent, who come merely to disapprove. And then there’s you.”

Micheletto lifts his head and looks at Salvadori. “What type am I, sir?”

The professor smiles. “You embody all of those types.”

“And what does that mean?” Possibility thrums inside Micheletto.

Salvadori smiles. “You’re looking for a teacher.”

Micheletto swallows his disappointment. “My family—we are poor. Even after a few years of saving, I would not have money enough to pay...”

The professor’s smile deepens as his gaze crawls slowly, insistently, over Micheletto. “One need not be enrolled at this school to learn, just as one need not pay coin in exchange for what is taught.”

Micheletto drops his gaze. He knows what Salvadori wants. An unnatural desire, the priests call it. Perhaps as unnatural, and natural, as cutting open a cadaver. He looks up again, looks at the body upon the slab, at the runnels of fluid washing the surface of the marble, and he sees not meat and bone but a man, the face beneath the sawn-open skull intact and peaceful.

“I must think on it,” Micheletto says.

Salvadori nods. “Of course.” He turns away, takes a few steps across the wet floor, then swings back with a smile of certainty. “I will be expecting you.”

*

“You went?” Cesare asks when Micheletto falls silent for a while.

“Yes. Eventually. After my father died.” Micheletto shifts in the saddle, straightening up and shaking off the weight of the past. “It was not done well, my father’s death. I was too hasty and had not yet learned the value of patience.”

He is rewarded for that with a crack of laughter, and Cesare grins at him. “Few of us learn that lesson.”

“I did. It took a while.” Micheletto permits himself a smile. “I studied with Salvadori for a year. What I did not learn from him, I taught myself.” He pauses and looks over at Cesare. “But still, it is wise to have some knowledge passed on by a master of his art. It can make all the difference between life and death.”

Cesare smiles in return, quick and affectionate and understanding. “Indeed it can, my friend. Indeed it does.”


End file.
